I have a better relationship with my sister-in-law, Ana, than I do with my brother (sorry, oppa, you know it's true though!), or with most people for that matter. After the birth of my now 3-year-old niece Serin and subsequently her 5-month-old sister Yerin, our relationship has continued to grow, and so has my knowledge of all things infant-related. Of countless parenting adventures, the one that Ana, as a stay-at-home mom, has invested the most effort in is finding nearby friends for both Serin and herself (it’s important the parents get along well too), and now Yerin. It turns out that for playmates to be suitable, there are quite a few preferable qualifications. As I later confirmed with my own research, Ana told me that of the few similar apps already out on the market, such as Mom Co and Hello Mamas, most were focused primarily on the moms making mom friends and planning playdates and event outings with them. For Ana and the moms and dads she knows, it’s easy to find local events on neighborhood Facebook groups; the greater difficulty is in finding the right friends. (Odd how that continues well into adulthood…)

Goals

As I set out to solve this problem, I had a couple overarching goals for the application itself and some for my development as a designer.

For the application

To present a means of finding compatible playmates by being able to filter comprehensively through a wide range of variables that may be important to the user (and the child)

To provide a natural environment to approach and contact new friends in the user’s geographic proximity

During the research process, I started compiling my thoughts together into a proto-persona of the target user.

With Ana’s help, I was able to get in contact with several stay-at-home parents, ranging in age from 27 to 42, primarily in the Northern VA area. This data, as well as general background knowledge, helped to pin where the target audience demographics lay and determine things like the age range selections for the filter feature. Speaking with these parents—each with different priorities when seeking new playmates for their little one(s)—allowed me to investigate what these priorities were.

A primary priority of Ana’s, as a Korean-American who speaks both languages fluently, was to find playmates who are being raised ambiculturally (able and willing to live seamlessly in two cultures/languages) in English and Korean as Serin is. Interestingly, according to research by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2013, 21 percent of the U.S. population speak a language other than English at home. (That was four years ago, and even then that means 1 in 5 people. Holy moly.)

I asked these parents what was most important to them in finding playmates, in order to paint a consensus for what the pertinent filterable criteria would be. Here is a list of what I gathered, loosely from most to least important:

Location: This is probably a no-brainer, and the most important for most parents. It’s a huge nuisance to drive anything more than half an hour to meet someone with whom you will—if all goes well—be spending a lot of together, meaning driving that distance each time.

Age range

Child: Another obvious one. A difference of a even few months can be significant at ages 0–4.

Parent: Some parents, especially the younger crowd, preferred hanging out with other parents their age.

Schedule/timeframe – This is two-part:

Available days of the week and times of the day: Some parents work part-time, so this is a necessary filter item for them.

Duration of playdate: Some parents just want to meet up for an hour or two, while others don’t see a point in such a short playdate. Everyone in the latter group knows the real reason for having playdates is to ease the chore of having to play with your kid by having them play among themselves and wear themselves out. (Don't judge if you aren’t a parent, or a knowledgeable aunt!)

Language/Culture: See above bit about ambicultural child-rearing.

Personality and Interests/Activities

Child: Even at age 2, kids have different personality traits, favored activities, and interests that make some more compatible with each other than others.

Parent: Since the parents will be spending all this time together, it helps if there are common interests among them as well.

Food allergies/sensitivities: When 1 in 13 U.S. children have at least one food allergy, finding compatible playmates for your child can sometimes become a crucial priority.

Gender

Child: Most parents like for their child to have both male and female friends, but I did talk to one parent whose daughter has only male friends by chance and proximity and wanted her to have a female playmate.

Parent: Because dads have a much harder time finding other dads.

Sibling(s): When Serin’s baby sister Yerin was born, it worked out for Ana that a few of Serin’s friends were getting a younger sibling of their own around the same time. I heard from several parents that it makes playdates a lot easier when all the kids have someone to play with.

Punctuality: This is a matter of personality and difference of opinion on what is acceptable. Still a valid point and even a dealbreaker for some.

Group size: One mom wanted her daughter to primarily hang out in large play groups to help get her out of her shell, while another thought a large group meant a large scheduling hassle.

During our interview session, one mom quietly brought up the fact that the other parents' education level was a factor for her. Although I valued all the input, I had to determine which pieces of data would be applied in the end; majority and an effort to keep the focus on the child, rather than the parent, ruled out.

Another thought was that there may be some parallels with dating apps. So in addition to other playdate-related apps on the market, I took note of some of the features and information architectures of dating apps as well.

Situated in one of my MacBook's Spaces (OS X's multiple desktops feature), this was a nice way to organize the app's site flow, one that I could take around with me easily.

Information Architecture – Flowcharts, Wireframes

Now I know, typically, information architecture in the form of a site outline and/or flowchart is the first step of creating an app or product, and once that’s in place, wireframes come after. In this case, I found the process involved:

making and refining an exhaustive list of features/screens that potentially could be implemented, gradually organized into a site outline,

culling a flowchart from this list,

arranging new artboards to match the flowchart and labeling them in Sketch,

printing the array of artboards and sketching wireframes on top,

while sketching, discovering other features that may be useful and adding them to the flowchart/wireframes,

designing bits and pieces of the screens in Sketch based on the wireframes,

repeating steps 4–6 in an admittedly not-so-clean process until I arrived at the current site flow and the beginnings of the current UI.

Naturally, once I brought the work into Sketch, I found myself wanting to make visual design decisions. This seemed like a good place to pause everything and devise the brand identity and guidelines before things got out of hand.

Note to self: Keep all work (clean) until documenting, and document early.

Brand Identity – Design and more

Color

I’ve always been an artist most inspired by color and color palettes. Whether I’m starting work on an illustration, picking out pieces for an outfit, or, as in this case, creating the visual identity of a brand, just having the right color or colors can create the particular look and feel I’m hoping to achieve. So I started there. For the Playmeets identity, I decided to begin with a single brand color to place focus on the content. I wanted the color to evoke playfulness and youth, so after playing with countless shades of yellows and some greens and oranges, I chose a yellow that was dark enough to use with large white text without looking muddy. After pairing it with a subdued plum magenta and designing out the preliminary screens to gain a sense of the look and feel, I liked it … until I didn’t. The more I looked at the colors, the more the yellow felt dull and the colors together too feminine.

My earlier color palette skewed just a tiny bit too girly.

Back to the palette of potential colors I went, and I fixated on a bright orange that my eyes kept returning to. It was only a hair off from the shade Flame from the Pantone Spring 2017 palette, which I googled, immediately loved, and set as my primary brand color. Then I added a light cyan from the other end of the color wheel as a secondary brand color, which added to the look & feel and worked perfectly for the sky background.

Logo Naming and Design

The name Playmeets was a natural derivation of the app’s primary function: to help the user meet new playmates. Since the term playmate is defined as “a friend with whom a child plays,” it’s another clue of what/who the app is for.

To arrive at the name, I wrote out all the keywords pertaining to the app: playmate, nearby, compatible, playdate, play, meet, find, friend. Then I wrote out the feelings the name should exude: playful, happy, childlike, bubbly, easy. From there, I made word maps of each of these words and their combinations. I liked ones that could be read in two ways, like Let'sPlayMate, but wanted something that was shorter and cleaner. At one point, I kept writing and mouthing the words meet and playmates, and it finally dawned on me how similiar the words sounded. From there, it was just a matter of frankensteining the two together.

Even before the name was determined, I knew I wanted to have some sort of characters that would personify the brand and represent the little ones. With that in the back of my head, I sketched out a few ideas until I happened on the idea of using the ‘ee’ in the name as two kid characters, with the second ɘ reversed to face the first e. That led to stylizing the name as ‘PLAYMeɘTS’ so that the ‘eɘ’ were clearly shorter, therefore, the children. I went back and forth between that and the more direct, titlecase ‘Playmeɘts’ and eventually stuck with the stylized spelling because the look of it in Rubik Black grew on me. More on that in the next paragraph.

Some logo sketches. I really ran with that ‘eɘ’ idea.

Typography

The demographic of the typical Playmeets user—parent in late young adulthood to early middle adulthood—generally points to someone who is too busy to worry about keeping up with the latest and greatest, but would appreciate a clean, easy, and engaging interface. Keeping that in mind, I tried to keep the typography straight-forward. For the majority of the app, I stuck to SF UI Text and Display in styles that would be familiar to iOS users. For the brand font, I chose the Bold weight of Hubert & Fischer’s fantastic Rubik. It struck all the notes I was going for: playful and lighthearted with considerable heft and presence, proportionately geometric, rounded but not too much as to make it bubbly. It was love at first sight. 😍

One other note about my use of Rubik: in the Heavy weight, it created a near exact form of the kind of e’s I wanted to use for my Playmeets characters. With just a slight modification, the logo, in both its full ‘PLAYMeɘts’ and short ‘eɘ’ variations, was good to go.

Playmeets logomark as app icon and logotype.

Copywriting

Part of the brand identity also included things like appropriate tone of the copy throughout the app. Not being much of a writer in a way I wish I was, this part was difficult. I presume if this were a real product and the team consisted of more than just me, this role would go to someone else. Still, I tried my darndest to keep the copy friendly, useful, actionable, and concise (unlike this case study—sorry!).

UI Design

Almost all the screens, organized by IA and flow.

For much of the work, I just made sure to create designs that made sense, was easy to follow, and fit the brand identity. Honestly, having a solid IA in place and not jumping into the visual design prematurely made the process delightfully clean. (I mean, honestly, you can’t hang pictures on the wall of a house that doesn’t exist.) In addition, taking a closer look at the apps I have installed on my phone and learning how they treated certain features was extremely helpful. By digging into what choices those designers made and why, I was able to make better informed design decisions for my own app.

One feature I wanted to highlight was Search/Filter. I initially wireframed and designed your typical filter selections screen, as such:

Top row: Initial design for the filter screens.Bottom row: Redesign after putting on my thinking cap.

Then, I quickly realized that for an app with the primary function of searching efficiently, this wouldn’t give the function its due importance and presence. In trying to achieve that, I got to remembering what an ordeal internet setup used to be and how different my last one a year ago was. The key difference was that the user experience was led by a cheery and thorough setup assistant. As gimmicky as that sounds, it was much more pleasant than dealing with a bunch of radio buttons and bars, with confusing categories that sound as if written by a robot. Inspired, I created a setup assistant for finding playmates that I think worked out pretty nicely.

Animations

While working on the Playmeets ‘eɘ’ mark, I realized animating the ‘e’ and ‘ɘ’ would be the only sensible thing to do. Hiding animated nuggets in places where the user should be rewarded—such as opening the app, sending a Playmeets request, gaining Playmeets, creating a new playdate—would keep the Playmeets app fun and engaging.

Prototype

Since short of an actual working app, a prototype is the best way to fully demonstrate the Playmeets user experience (including the UI), here is the prototype of the app.

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Reflection – Some final thoughts

In the two weeks I spent working on this project, I come away with lessons learned and ideas for furthering work on the app.

I stand by my decision to limit the post-friending functions of the app, as it is meant to primarily be used to find playmates and leave what happens after to the users. To that end I believe a friend suggestions feature, or a way to discover new friends other than manually using the Search/Filter feature, would be beneficial, perhaps on the People tab.

In creating the animations for the login, friend request, friend made, playdate set screens, the circle shape was used as the basis of all the graphic components.

One of the next steps would be to create a cohesive icon set for the ones used throughout the app with the circle as a visual guide.

Utilizing the ‘eɘ’ guys in more graphics and animations would make the brand more personable.

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I was encouraged by a wonderful friend to include more digital work in my portfolio, and that prompted this project I enjoyed and learned much from. So I thank her, and, thank you so much for reading!

What next?

Head over to my Behance to see more (mostly older) work.
Check out my Instagram to see examples of my off-hours creative thinking.